Optical fibers include a core typically formed from glass or plastic and configured to transmit optical signals therethrough. A cladding surrounds the core. When coupling optical fibers, the cores of each fiber must be aligned to enable the optical signals from a first fiber to be transmitted to a second fiber. Failure to properly align the cores of the fibers may result in an improper transmission of the optical signal from the first optical fiber to the second optical fiber. In particular, portions of the optical signal may not be transmitted from the first optical fiber to the second optical fiber. Improper transmissions between the fibers may result in lost data when transmitting the optical signal.
Multi-core optical fibers include a plurality of cores with a cladding surrounding the cores. The use of multi-core optical fibers can significantly increase data-carrying capacity in optical network by allowing a plurality of optical data signals to be carried in parallel by a single fiber. However, splicing two multi-core fibers may be more difficult than the alignment of two single-core fibers because a plurality of cores must be individually aligned between the fibers simultaneously. The complexity involved in identifying and precisely aligning the individual positions of each core of the multi-core fibers can restrict the use of multi-core fibers in telecommunications.